They Shook Death City
by raining-down-hearts
Summary: In which Maka gets tailgated and Soul gets new nightmare material. Drabble, crackish.


It takes Soul ten long, long minutes before he dares to say anything, and it's only the way his twenty-one years of life flash before his eyes when Maka nearly side-swipes someone trying to pass her that gives him enough courage to open his mouth at all.

"Maka," he croaks, white-knuckling the sides of his seat. "You're kinda getting crazy."

She attempts to set him on fire with her eyes. "I'm going the _speed limit_! The legal speed every single damn car on this stupid freeway is _supposed_ to be going! And you think I'm crazy, Soul Evans? No one's going to get away with trying to force me to break the law! These people should all be arrested!" He gives her a sickly smile and slumps down, trying not to notice the long line of semi-trucks who've built up behind them as she tootles happily along in the slow lane. A little blue Honda zooms by on their left, and Maka takes her hands off ten and two just long enough to point at it. "Look at that! Look at that asshole! He's gotta be going, what, _eighty? _Christ!"

She says 'eighty' with as much horrified indignation as if it were really 'a hundred and twenty' or something, like she's right in the middle of Fast & Furious, and Soul gives her an appeasing and entirely fake smile again before slumping down further. Someone creeps up behind her and she taps her brakes warningly, glaring daggers into her rearview mirror; the offender swoops around her with a loud, drawn-out honk that makes her hiss, "I'm going to eviscerate the next jerk that tailgates me! How do these people even have their licenses? The law clearly states that there should be three car lengths between everyone at all times!"

"Yup," Soul mumbles miserably, withering under the scornful stares of each driver that passes them. Behind them, someone else honks; he puts his hand over his face as Maka turns a previously never-before-seen shade of enraged scarlet. He tugs his phone out of his pocket and, fingers flying desperately, shoots Black Star a woeful text: 'Help me. help me. help me. If i get killd take care of my cycle.'

Black Star responds speedily with, 'maka wnatetd 2 drive u huh HAHAHAHA sry bro. she drives lke shes 100 yrs old.'

Soul snorts in spite of himself, in a sort of horrified wonderment. If Maka's this shitty of a driver now, how bad is she going to get as the years pass? By the time she's thirty she'll be driving for miles with her turn signal on and getting out at intersections to scream invective at people whose bass is too loud. He resolves, with a steely determination previously reserved only for life-and-death matters such as which brand of hair gel to buy or who he trusts to tune his piano, to never, ever, ever get into the car with his meister again unless she lets_him_ behind the wheel.

"Look at this guy!" Maka shrieks suddenly. Soul definitely does not jump in fear. "He's like an inch from my bumper!" She sticks her hand out the window and waves. "Pass me! Pass me, you jackass, if you wanna get a ticket for speeding just fucking go around me!"

The gleaming chrome grill of the black Escalade behind them only creeps closer. "That tint is illegal as hell," Soul says to nobody in particular, watching the way Maka's right eye is twitching with fascination not unlike a mouse before a snake.

"What the hell!" she bellows as the Escalade flips its lights on and off. "What does he want?" Beneath her clenched fingers, the abused steering wheel gives a groan.

Soul plasters himself as far against his door as he can possibly get and whispers, "I think he wants you to speed up a little, you know, go with traffic?"

She pins him with a look so burningly ferocious that he'd swear he feels his spirit try to leave his body out of sheer fear. He actually pats his hair to make sure it hasn't spontaneously combusted under her green glare. "Do you not know the meaning of the word limit! As in speed limit!" she screams, pounding the dash with a fist.

Soul half-opens his mouth to tell her something like sarcastic and enlightening like, "No one actually _goes_ the speed limit except senior citizens, drunks and stoners," but she's actually baring her teeth at her mirror now, snarling like a rabid road-raging tiger, and he subsides with a muted squeak. It's nice to be alive and in one piece, even if his psycho girlfriend is ranting and raving and generally pissing off everyone in rush hour. She's still more scary than all the irritated commuters surrounding them, though. Barely.

The Escalade beeps its horn, which for some reason sounds like a weird tone-deaf rendition of 'Eye of the Tiger', and, defying all physics, Maka's face goes from scarlet to positively purple. When Soul glances in his side mirror, all he can see is the chunky front end of the thing, right up on the bumper of Maka's car. 'Eye of the Tiger' honks again, with awful discordance, Maka sears the air with some of her generally hidden but inarguably impressive catalogue of profanity, Soul considers converting just so he can pray to be miraculously teleported away from this whole clusterfuck- because praying to Lord Death, god though he may be, has never done a damn thing- and then that stupid horn toots obnoxiously from half a foot behind them again and Maka snaps.

Soul, watching her, feels sort of like he's falling in slow motion off a cliff. Down into lava, perhaps, or a river full of starving piranhas. His stomach churns, his mouth goes dry, his palms are instantly sweaty. She screams a word so profane that the paint on the truck passing them blisters off, sticks her middle finger out the window and waves it around, then, for good measure, she slams on her brakes again, so hard that the Escalade has to swerve onto the shoulder to keep from rearending her. Gravel flies. The scent of burning rubber is obvious and harsh. Maka smirks victoriously into her mirror and happily zooms onto the next exit, oblivious to Soul's traumatized whimpering.

"We're almost there," she chirps, obviously in a wonderful mood after nearly killing them both, rolling to a gentle stop as they hit a red light.

"I'm going to wash my motorcycle tomorrow," Soul whispers, putting his head between his knees and taking deep breaths. "I'm going to love her and wax her and change her oil and never ever drive anything else."

"Hmm?"

"Nothing!" Soul fixes his gaze hastily out the window. Then something huge and dark rolling up behind them like a rap-blaring stormcloud catches his eye, and his harassed spirit makes another break for it as he gasps. "Oh, fuck, Maka, look what you did-"

"Huh? What? What- oh! Oh, this jerk? Oh my freakin' god! Did he follow me?" She adjust her rearview to goggle at the black Escalade that's materialized behind them. The driver leans on the horn until 'Eye of the Tiger' blends into one long, agonizing yelp, not unlike a drunken Spirit who's been locked out of his daughter's apartment.

Then the Escalade creeps forward, ever so carefully, and that massive, sparkling, grinning grill delicately taps Maka's rusted bumper. Soul chokes. His heart stutters. Maka punches a hole straight through the dash.

She throws on the emergency brake and is out of the car so fast she practically blurs, ignoring the traffic light, which is now green, as well as the shouts and curses of the cars stuck behind them. As Soul curls into the fetal position and locks his door, he can hear her hoarse screams of fury, and what sounds suspiciously like an expensive door being assaulted by tiny flying fists. Suddenly 'Eye of the Tiger' seems nauseatingly appropriate. "You asshole! Get out of your fucking drug dealer car thingy right now! Get out! Get out! You think you can tailgate me, you absolute _dickface_, no way! Come on! Come on!"

It's not until Soul hears the Escalade's door open that he can force himself to get out of the car, and honestly, it's mostly because he's entirely afraid Maka will actually kill someone, and a Deathscythe with a jailed meister is no Deathscythe at all. She's come close to homicide three times before, once when some drunk chick at a bar pinched his ass, once when she caught Spirit trying to use her credit card to buy mass quantities of Viagra from Mexico, and another time when Black Star bought her a push-up bra for her nineteenth birthday. Each time she'd had to be physically restrained after trying to use, respectively, a beer coaster, a computer keyboard, and a plastic spork as deadly weapons.

So, as Soul edges around the back of the car to join his rampaging meister, sweating and sick, the familiar shock of blue hair exploding out of the driver's side of the Escalade gives him immediate spork flashbacks. "Oh fuck."

"_You_ were the slow-ass bitch clogging up the freeway?" Black Star says, jaw dropping.

Maka's reaction is less hesitant. "You!" she roars before pouncing.

Soul, unable to match their speed, can only watch in quivering dread as they turn into a yowling, cursing, bone-crunching tornado. At one point, gathering his shredded bravery and egged on by the sound of sirens in the distance, he tries to wade into the fray and break things up; he is immediately tossed out on his ass, with a black eye for dessert. After that, he slinks back inside the car, drives it out of the way of everyone, parks it at the nearest gas station, and waits for the cops to take care of things.

When he and Tsubaki visit the jail later to bail out Maka, she and Black Star are sitting on either side of the cell, staring at their respective walls, both with arms defiantly crossed over their chests and both with identical scowls on their bruised faces. Black Star is black and blue from head to toe, and he's missing a chunk of hair over his temple; Maka's broken nose is spread over her cheekbone like a smashed tomato and she's limping ferociously when she rises to come talk to Soul.

The rotund officer escorting Tsubaki and Soul is not thrilled at all, judging by the way he looks at the two jailbirds, annoyed and perhaps a little stunned. "I'm considering telling Lord Death these two oughta be classified as a force of nature," he tells Tsubaki, jerking a thumb at Black Star, who growls in Maka's direction.

Tsubaki gives a pained smile. "Oh," she says softly, wringing her hands. "How- how much damage was, uh, done? Black Star couldn't tell me much when he called-"

"He couldn't talk because I fractured his tailgating dickhead idiot jaw," Maka says, rather nonsensically, but with clear satisfaction.

Black Star makes a sound like an irritated seagull and leaps on her, wrenching the filthy seat off the sole toilet in their cell as he goes and wielding it like an unsanitary battleaxe, slurring something that sounds oddly like, "It's tigering time!"

After the policeman peppersprays them both through the bars, he tallies up the cost of their rampage for Soul and Tsubaki, while their red-eyed, subdued partners weep silently behind bars, nursing their fresh pain. Black Star in particular, who received the brunt of the pepper spray as he attempted to choke Maka to death with her own pigtails, is beginning to resemble a piece of already-chewed gum. Maka is sitting regally with her nose in the air, not looking at anybody, ignoring the gentle drip of tears and blood off her stubborn chin. Soul feels vaguely wrongfooted, as if he's stepped into an alternate dimension populated entirely by evil twins.

"So you're saying their bail is set at twenty thousand and the DWMA is going to be responsible for all the damages they caused," he says at last, trying to get everything straight in his head. How could a little road rage cause this much chaos?

"Twenty grand each," the officer corrects smugly, stroking his pepper spray. "They dented my squad car," he adds to no one, almost petulantly.

"Oh," Tsubaki squawks again, fingers combing almost desperately through the frazzled end of her ponytail.

"How- how-" Soul wheels on Maka and shakes the bars, yelping. His day was_not_ supposed to end up in a stinking jail. "What did you guys_ do_?"

She lifts her chin even further, even as her broken nose whistles gently. "I may or may not have thrown him through a window," she proclaims grandly.

Black Star looks stormy and mutters indistinctly, "Grandma driver!"

"Tailgating dogfaced asswipe," she spits back. Tsubaki goes pale.

"Crazy bitch! My left nut could drive better than you!" Black Star barks, nearly cross-eyed with temper.

Maka's eye performs that ominous, telltale twitch again, a sign of impending apocalypse on par with the sudden appearance of the Four Horsemen, and Soul hastily rattles the bars, heading her off before she can shock poor Tsubaki any more. "Okay, okay! Look, I'll get you out. Just, uh, I'm gonna have to go talk to Lord Death about your bail."

"Okay," she and Black Star mumble in miserable chorus; they glare at each other, offended, and then spin around to resume their initial positions plastered against opposite walls of their cell, quietly brooding and bleeding at once.

Upon being enlightened as to the full extent of the damage his two top meisters actually caused- including but not limited to three smashed cars, four toppled trees, one stop sign used as a giant frisbee of doom, a severely traumatized poodle that was briefly sent into orbit, the total loss of one 7-11 convenience store and the neighboring pizza place, the creation of a new lake, and the burning, gutted remnants of an Escalade mysteriously impaled atop a telephone pole- Lord Death roundly refused to pay any bail. In fact, he assigned them both trash pickup on the side of the freeway for the next year.

Black Star and Maka both left their cell a week later in wheelchairs, but ever after, she would set her cruise control at 70 miles an hour and keep her most creative profanity in check during traffic, and Black Star never got within three car lengths of another vehicle.

Soul could never get into a car with his meister without getting the cold sweats, though.


End file.
